Ricky Ray
A Graveyard
A walk that was weary until the clearing came into view. Not the eerie quiet one might expect, but the dead quiet of a birdbath attended by no birds, ants excavating a skull under a windless sky. Flowers, dead too, except for the wild ones—among them a mixture of the living and dying.
Bouquets, and single roses, bunches of hyacinth and phlox, marigolds and coxcomb. Something else unnamed and poisonous. Broken liquor bottles and beer cans. Someone has been here, someone has left these tokens of affection, or derision, someone may be watching—from which side of the divide? If a divide, if.
A graveyard, because there are stones, fallen, heads on a platter, and something underneath—the width of a baby, asleep at the breast, the width of a man, his hands done with touch. Stones cut and engraved, topped by arcs that resemble the trajectories of lives—over and across, into the waters, like dropped dreams.
The faces of stones shorn of details,
except to say: multitudes lie here--
time and weather have
erased the meaning of who.
Someone cared, someone stood these stones upright to testify to the breaking of hearts over the burying of bodies. Someone who died, away from here, who couldn’t watch the stones fall, or right the fallen stones, which testify to the falling of the bodies around those hearts too.
And here, in the thud of footsteps, as in the tapping of an invisible finger on the skull—a thud heard now though it hasn’t been heard for years—a whisper, that you too will fall, and everyone you know, and all the houses you have lived in, and these woods, this planet, this galaxy, and then, who knows.
Maybe what started it all will see to its end, might even then remain, might stir, might be so restless in its thirst for being, for movement, that it sings from the stone, the dust, the last disappearing speck, and sends it all reverberating again.
Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. His recent work can be found in The American Scholar (blog), Matador Review, Fugue, Lodestone, Sixfold, and Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. His awards include the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize and Katexic’s Cormac McCarthy prize. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, three cats, and a dog; the bed is frequently overcrowded.
A Graveyard
A walk that was weary until the clearing came into view. Not the eerie quiet one might expect, but the dead quiet of a birdbath attended by no birds, ants excavating a skull under a windless sky. Flowers, dead too, except for the wild ones—among them a mixture of the living and dying.
Bouquets, and single roses, bunches of hyacinth and phlox, marigolds and coxcomb. Something else unnamed and poisonous. Broken liquor bottles and beer cans. Someone has been here, someone has left these tokens of affection, or derision, someone may be watching—from which side of the divide? If a divide, if.
A graveyard, because there are stones, fallen, heads on a platter, and something underneath—the width of a baby, asleep at the breast, the width of a man, his hands done with touch. Stones cut and engraved, topped by arcs that resemble the trajectories of lives—over and across, into the waters, like dropped dreams.
The faces of stones shorn of details,
except to say: multitudes lie here--
time and weather have
erased the meaning of who.
Someone cared, someone stood these stones upright to testify to the breaking of hearts over the burying of bodies. Someone who died, away from here, who couldn’t watch the stones fall, or right the fallen stones, which testify to the falling of the bodies around those hearts too.
And here, in the thud of footsteps, as in the tapping of an invisible finger on the skull—a thud heard now though it hasn’t been heard for years—a whisper, that you too will fall, and everyone you know, and all the houses you have lived in, and these woods, this planet, this galaxy, and then, who knows.
Maybe what started it all will see to its end, might even then remain, might stir, might be so restless in its thirst for being, for movement, that it sings from the stone, the dust, the last disappearing speck, and sends it all reverberating again.
Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. His recent work can be found in The American Scholar (blog), Matador Review, Fugue, Lodestone, Sixfold, and Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. His awards include the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize and Katexic’s Cormac McCarthy prize. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, three cats, and a dog; the bed is frequently overcrowded.